A ship on her first voyage
The Batavia was a large merchant ship of the Dutch East India Company, known by its Dutch initials as the VOC. She was built in Amsterdam in 1628 and set out on her maiden voyage that October, bound for the company’s headquarters at Batavia, the town on Java now called Jakarta. The ship carried soldiers, sailors, passengers and a cargo that included trade goods and chests of silver coin, intended to pay for goods in Asia.
She belonged to the class of vessel usually called an East Indiaman, designed to carry bulk cargo and a substantial crew over very long distances. Several hundred people were aboard, and the commonly cited figure is around 320 to 340, though sources vary slightly.
The route and the wreck
Ships of the company followed the Cape route round southern Africa, then turned east to ride the strong westerly winds of the southern Indian Ocean before turning north towards Java. It was a fast way to cross, but it demanded careful navigation, and in that period it was difficult to establish longitude accurately. Ships sometimes ran further east than their officers intended.
The Batavia reached the Houtman Abrolhos, a group of low islands and reefs off the west coast of Australia, in the early hours of 4 June 1629. She ran onto a reef now known as Morning Reef. The ship could not be freed, and many people got ashore on nearby islets with little water and very little shelter. Some drowned in the process.
Command and a divided leadership
Francisco Pelsaert, the senior merchant, was in overall charge of the voyage’s business. The skipper, Ariaen Jacobsz, was responsible for sailing the ship. By most accounts the two had a poor relationship, and the voyage was already tense before the wreck. Another figure, Jeronimus Cornelisz, an under-merchant who had been an apothecary, had been involved in a plot to seize the ship before she struck the reef. Historians still debate how far the plot had advanced and whether Jacobsz was a willing partner.
After the wreck, Pelsaert and Jacobsz, with a group of officers and passengers, sailed in the ship’s boat to find water and then headed for Batavia to ask for help, a journey of roughly 1,800 nautical miles that they completed in around a month. Cornelisz was left in command of the survivors on the islands.
The mutiny and killings
What followed is documented in the official records the company later made, drawn from the testimony of survivors. Cornelisz organised a group around him and, over several weeks, they killed a large number of the other survivors. The victims included men, women and children. Estimates of the death toll run to well over a hundred. This was less a conventional mutiny against a captain than a campaign of murder by a small group seeking to take control of a scarce supply of food and water and, apparently, of the rescue vessel they expected to arrive.
A group of soldiers led by a man named Wiebbe Hayes had been sent to search for water on another island and had found it. When word of what was happening reached them, they organised their defence. Hayes and his men resisted attacks from Cornelisz’s followers, and the conflict ended with the capture of Cornelisz shortly before Pelsaert returned.
Rescue and punishment
Pelsaert came back in a company ship, the Sardam, in September or October 1629. He had to deal at once with the mutineers. Cornelisz and several others were tried on the spot, and some were executed on the islands. Two men were reportedly marooned on the mainland as a lesser punishment, and their fate is unknown. Others were taken to Batavia for trial and punished there.
Pelsaert himself was held partly responsible for the loss of the ship, and was apparently censured by the company. He died not long afterwards. The survivors who reached Batavia included the people who had endured the islands, as well as some of the cargo, part of which was salvaged.
Rediscovery and archaeology
The wreck was located in 1963 after a search by amateur divers and fishermen, and the reef was identified as the one on which the Batavia ran aground. Excavations in the 1970s by the Western Australian Museum produced large quantities of material, including a stone portico intended for the fort at Batavia, ship’s timbers, silver coin and personal belongings. Remains of those killed on the island known as Beacon Island were also found and studied. This work has made the site one of the foundational projects of maritime archaeology in Australia.
Parts of the hull timbers were conserved and are displayed in a maritime museum in Fremantle, while a full-size replica of the ship was built in the Netherlands in the 1980s and 1990s, at Lelystad, using methods drawn from the seventeenth century.
What it shows
The Batavia matters partly because the Dutch East India Company kept unusually good records, which let historians reconstruct events with a degree of confidence. It also illustrates the dangers of long voyages on the early routes to the East Indies. Failures of navigation, strained command, and the sudden loss of order when a ship is lost can all be seen in the account. The story is grim, and historians treat the numbers and some details with caution, but its outline is firmly supported by the surviving evidence.